How to add a forced line break inside a table cell

Question

I have some text in a table and I want to add a forced line break. I want to insert a forced line break without having to specify the column width. Something like this:

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
Foo bar & Foo <forced line break here> bar & Foo bar \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

I know that \\ inserts a line break in most cases, but here it starts a new table row instead.

Similar question: How to break a line in a table

Answer 1

It's a quite old question, but I'll add my answer anyway, as the method I suggest didn't appear in the others

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
Foo bar & \begin{tabular}[x]{@{}c@{}}Foo\\bar\end{tabular} & Foo bar \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

where x is either t, c, or b to force the desired vertical alignment.

In case this is needed in more than a couple of places, it's better to define a command

\newcommand{\specialcell}[2][c]{%
  \begin{tabular}[#1]{@{}c@{}}#2\end{tabular}}

so the table line before can be one of

Foo bar & \specialcell{Foo\\bar} & Foo bar \\    % vertically centered
Foo bar & \specialcell[t]{Foo\\bar} & Foo bar \\ % aligned with top rule
Foo bar & \specialcell[b]{Foo\\bar} & Foo bar \\ % aligned with bottom rule

More variations are possible, for instance specifying also the horizontal alignment in the special cell.

Notice the @{} to suppress added space before and after the cell text.

Answer 2

It really is no wonder why LaTeX is said to be complicated! Just look at your answers to such an easy question! How about an easy solution to an every day problem?

\usepackage{pbox}

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|} \hline
    \pbox{20cm}{This is the first \\ cell} & second \\ \hline
    3rd & and the last cell \\ \hline
\end{tabular}

Note that the width supplied to \pbox is a maximum width. If the content is shorter the length of the longest line is taken.

Answer 3

You can switch your cell layout to paragraph to use the \newline command.

\begin{tabular}{|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|}
\hline
Test & foo \newline bar \\
...

Answer 4

Use the tabularx environment instead of tabular, and then use \newline where you want line breaks within a cell.

\usepackage{tabularx}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{lX}
    Section:   &  This is my     \newline
                  long paragraph \\
\end{tabularx}

The tabularx environment has a special column type, X, in addition to the usual ones, and its first argument is the desired width of the table. The X column will have the necessary width in order to make the whole table the desired width.

Details on tabularx can be found here.

Answer 5

\begin{tabular}{lll}
a&\vbox{\hbox{\strut ASDF}\hbox{\strut ASDF}\hbox{\strut This is my
really long line}}&c
\end{tabular}

The \strut is essential for spacing.

Answer 6

How about using \parbox in a custom command

\documentclass{article}
\newsavebox\mybox
\newlength\mylength
\newcommand\boxup[2]{%
  \savebox\mybox{#1}%
  \setlength\mylength{\wd\mybox}%
  \parbox{\mylength}{#1 \\ #2}%
}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
Foo bar & \boxup{Foo}{bar} & Foo bar \\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

This takes two arguments with the assumption that the first line is longer than the second. It would be possible to refine the code to work through an arbitrary number of lines and find the longest. If that's of interest I'll write something, probably using expl3 for the looping.

Answer 7

I think multirow is a simple elegant solution, at least for simple tables.

For example, I tried a few of the suggestions above but I found this worked the best:

\usepackage{multirow}
\begin{table}[ht]
    \caption{RESTful Resources}
    \centering
    \begin{tabular}{l l l}
        \hline
        Resource & Methods & Description \\
        \hline 
        \multirow{2}{*}{Resource1} & \multirow{2}{*}{POST, PUT} 
            & This resource contains ...\\
          & & \emph{Media types: text/plain, application/json}\\
        \multirow{2}{*}{Resource2} & \multirow{2}{*}{POST, PUT} 
            & This resource contains ...\\
          & & \emph{Media types: text/plain, application/json} \\
        \hline 
    \end{tabular}
    \label{table:resources}
\end{table}

Answer 8

I don't have direct help on how to add a linebreak, but using the multirow package may provide different route to same desired end. You can read a tutorial here:

http://andrewjpage.com/index.php?/archives/43-Multirow-and-multicolumn-spanning-with-latex-tables.html

But I have a feeling the \parbox answer in the similar question you linked is what you're looking for. I think using a box in the cell is going to be simplest and best way, was there something about that that wasn't working for you?

If you want to use parbox without having to hardcode in a width, here's one way that works for me. Not perfect, since it requires you to know beforehand the text of the longest line in the multi-line column, but it does work:

% define new length and set to length of longest line
\newlength{\longline}
\settowidth{\longline}{longest line in table}\\

\begin{tabular}{lll}

one line & \parbox[t]{\longline}{longest line in table \\ and another line} & more text \\
second line here& and what & more text 
\end{tabular}

Answer 9

I believe I have the simplest answer here:

If you are using a paragraph column in a table, you can put text in an alignment environment and the table does not pick up the \\ as a new table row, so you can use it normally. For example:

\begin{tabular}{p{2in}p{2in}}
    \begin{flushleft}
        Some text over here \\ 
        newline! \\ 
        \bigskip all the way down 
    \end{flushleft} 
    & 
    \begin{flushleft}
        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur 
        adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod
        tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore 
        magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam,
        quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris 
        nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo\\ \bigskip
        consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in 
        reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse
        cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. 
        Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non
        proident, sunt in culpa qui officia 
        deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.\\ 
        \bigskip \bigskip lorem ipsum\\
    \end{flushleft}\\
\end{tabular}\\

Will give you a table with line breaks using the \\ command.

Answer 10

This is a really old question, but since this was linked from a recent question on separating content and presentation, I'll add a ConTeXt answer for comparision.

In ConTeXt, \crlf adds a forced line-break, so achieving a forced line-break in a table is as simple as just adding \crlf in the appropriate place. Here is the complete example:

% Setup for rules at the top and bottom
\startsetups table:rules
  \setupTABLE[frame=off]
  \setupTABLE[row][first][topframe=on]
  \setupTABLE[row][last][bottomframe=on]
\stopsetups

% Setups for middle alignment
\startsetups table:middle
  \setupTABLE[align=middle]
\stopsetups

\starttext

\startTABLE[setups={table:rules, table:middle}]
  \NC Foo bar \NC Foo \crlf Bar \NC Foo bar \NC \NR
  \NC Foo bar \NC Foo \crlf Bar \NC Foo bar \NC \NR
\stopTABLE

\stoptext

which gives:

Answer 11

You can use minipage:

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.2\columnwidth}%
This is the first line
\newline
second line
\newline
...
\end{minipage}

Answer 12

You can also just fake it:

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
Foo bar & Foo & Foo bar \\
~       & bar &  ~      \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

Answer 13

This approach isn't so different from some of the others already given, except that it "externalises" all of the design decisions from the table definition itself (that is, leaving it cleaner to write and read each table should you want to include multiple tables like this throughout your doc or docs).

Preliminaries (presumably in your preamble):

\usepackage{array} % needed if you're going to use \\ together with centering,
                   % raggedright, raggedleft in your column specifier (see
                   % manuals on \arraybackslash)
\newlength{\mywidestcolwidth}
\newcommand*\mycellformat{\protect\footnotesize}
\newcommand*\mytableparskip{\setlength\parskip{4pt}}
\newcommand*\setmywidestcolwidth[1]{
  \settowidth{\mywidestcolwidth}{\mycellformat #1}
}

Usage:

\setmywidestcolwidth{foo baz bar}
\begin{tabular}{|>{\mycellformat}c
                |>{\mytableparskip\mycellformat\centering\arraybackslash}p{\mywidestcolwidth}
                |>{\mycellformat}c|}
\hline
foo bar baz&
foo

foo baz bar

baz& 
foo

foo baz bar

baz\\ \hline
\end{tabular}

Skip the \mycellformat and \parskip if you have no need for them (although not necessary in your case, I included \parskip since it's useful to visually distinguish paragraphs from one another since paragraph indentation is automatically switched off in tables, and added \mycellformat to allow for uniform document-wide table design settings).

Answer 14

changed suggestion above to accomplish different problem with second line being longer...

\mybox\usepackage{ifthen}

\newsavebox{\mybox}%
\newsavebox{\myboxx}%
\newlength{\mylengthA}%
\newlength{\mylengthB}%
\newlength{\mylength}%
\newcommand{\boxup}[2]{%
\savebox{\mybox}{#1}%
\setlength\mylengthA{\wd\mybox}%
\savebox{\myboxx}{#2}%
\setlength\mylengthB{\wd\myboxx}%
\ifthenelse{\lengthtest{\mylengthA>\mylengthB}}
           {\setlength{\mylength}{\mylengthA}}
           {\setlength{\mylength}{\mylengthB}}
\parbox{\mylength}{\centering #1 \\ #2}%
}